San Joaquin Delta College students come in all varieties, but as dozens of them crowded into a small room during their lunch hour Wednesday, it was clear they had one thing in common:

They were willing to save someone's life - even that of a stranger - at the simple ring of a telephone tomorrow or 20 years from now.

More than 140 students agreed to donate marrow to patients with leukemia or other blood diseases, should a match ever be identified.

They joined a growing bone-marrow registry that now has more than 14 million names of willing donors across the United States.

"I was in chemistry class when they told us about it," said 20-year-old Denise Mendez of Stockton. "I did it because my grandma just passed away two years ago from cancer."

For 22-year-old Alex Arlt, the connection was a nephew who had been sick when he was just a boy.

"But I would do it for a stranger, too," Arlt said. "Give them a second chance at life."

Delta's Alpha Gamma Sigma honor society brought organizers with the Be The Match program, part of the National Marrow Donor Program, to Delta's campus for the first time in recent memory, if ever.

What better place to seek donors than a college campus? Donors must be healthy and relatively young - from the ages of 18 to 44.

Some students had been told by their instructors of this opportunity. Others were recruited as they walked through Danner Hall. "Want to save a life?" they were asked, a question to which it was kind of hard to say no.

It was just a matter of filling out some paperwork and then brushing cotton swabs along the inside of their cheeks, collecting tissue needed to establish possible matches in the future.

No longer does donating marrow require surgery, at least in most cases.

Now blood can be drawn from the body and run through a machine that separates out the blood-forming cells. The work is done during a series of appointments over a four- to six-week period.

When Delta business and accounting instructor Chris Wardell was 3 years old, his younger brother died from leukemia. It was a devastating event that led his parents to separate and "destroyed our family," he said.

That was 1952, two decades before researchers began to investigate the possibility of bone marrow transplants.

Wardell, who advises the honor society and played a part in bringing the marrow donor event to Delta, saw every student in that room Wednesday as potentially easing the pain of some other family.